It will strike some as paradoxical or bewildering that Jewish religious thinkers and leaders find it more compatible to dialogue with authentic evangelical Christians than with so-called Messianic Jews.

That is not a matter of elitism or of social etiquette. Rather, it derives from profound theological conviction as well as from prudential considerations.

Jews and evangelicals (and other) Christians share a rich inheritance of biblical belief, values, and ideals about God, man, nature, society, history, and the kingdom to come. At the same time, Jews and Christians differ over critical affirmations about the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and the forgiveness of sin. (For an excellent discussion of the Jewish theological reasons for these differences, read Jews and Jewish Christianity, by David Berger and M. Wyschogrod, Ktav Publishers, New York.)

Jews stake their existence on the truth of their 4,000-year-old belief in ethical monotheism. “On the day when the Lord spoke to you out of the fire on Horeb, you saw no figure of any kind; so take good care not to fall into the degrading practice of making figures carved in relief, in the form of a manor a woman” (Deut. 4:15). As formulated by the great scholar and codifier, Maimonides, in thirteenth-century Spain, Jews believe that the God of Israel “has no corporeal image and has no body.” Judaism is incompatible with any belief in the divinity of a human being.

While Judaism believes that all Gentiles are obligated to observe the seven Noachian principles of moral and ethical behavior in order “to be assured a place in the world to come.” Jewish tradition allows that Gentiles can believe in the Trinitarian concept, termed in Hebrew as shittuf (partnership). Belief in shittuf, Judaism affirms, does not constitute idolatry for non-Jews, but does so for Jews.

Jews, born of a Jewish mother, who become so-called Messianic Jews, are bound by the Covenant of Sinai, which explicitly excludes the possibility of any belief that God shares his being in any partnership with any other being (Exod. 20:2–6; Deut. 4:15–21).

It is the faith of Israel that God’s election of his holy people is eternal and irrevocable (Deut. 7:9, “He is God, the faithful God, which keepeth the covenant and mercy to a thousandth generation”). God’s law remains binding for all Jews for all times. A Messianic Jew can stop obeying the Law, and usually does. He can marry out of the faith, so that within two or three generations the golden chain of Jewish continuity is broken. Throughout the centuries, this is exactly what happened to Jews who left the synagogue and entered the church.

While humanly one might empathize with Messianic Jews who wish nostalgically to retain some cultural linkages with the Jewish people—whether for guilt or other emotional reasons—in point of fact, reenacting Jewish rituals of the Sabbath, the Passover, the bar mitzvah, without commitment to the convictions they symbolize, soon make a mockery of their sacred meanings.

When those rituals are employed as a ruse or a device to trick other Jews into believing that they can remain both authentic Jews as well as authentic, believing Christians, that is nothing less than deception, which is not worthy of any high religion such as Christianity.

MARC H. TANENBAUM¹Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum is national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee and coedilor of the book Evangelicals and Jews in Conversation (Baker, 1978).

Jewish leaders have assumed that messianic congregations are really churches with bits of Jewishness sprinkled on top for effect. Contrary to this, we say we are legitimately part of the Jewish community.

We take our cue from the apostles, including Paul, who not only observed Jewish practices and continued to worship in the temple (Acts 2:46; 3:1; 18:18; 21:20–26), but celebrated the holidays as well (Acts 20:5–6, 16; 27:9). In fact, Paul defended himself by asserting that he had “not transgressed the customs of our fathers” (Acts 25:8; 26:5; 28:17). Irenaeus, an early church leader, attests to this: “But they themselves … continued in the ancient observances.… Thus did the apostles scrupulously act according to the dispensation of the Mosaic law” (Against Heresies 3:23:15).

Building on this apostolic model, messianic congregations, or synagogues, have developed a worship and lifestyle incorporating Jewish traditions and synagogue practice to varying degrees. For example, in our congregation we use the traditional synagogue prayers, and our worship is similar to a Conservative synagogue except that we include the New Testament. Our members observe the holidays, and most light the Sabbath candles. The compatibility of the traditions—most of which were in place before Jesus’ time—with messianic faith makes this possible. In fact, it appears that Jesus drew on parts of two standard Jewish prayers, the Amidah and Kaddish, for the Lord’s Prayer.

The traditions and holidays provide beautiful pictures of God’s actions in history centered in Jesus, or Yeshua (Hebrew for Jesus). A knowledge of the holidays is crucial to a complete understanding of numerous biblical passages (e.g,. John 7:37–39; 8:12; 1:29). This messianic fulfillment perspective is what some Jewish people find objectionable or label as a distortion of Judaism, but which is nevertheless validated by Yeshua’s resurrection. But the holidays and traditions have meaning apart from their fulfillment in Yeshua; they are vehicles for conveying important truths about God and his universe, and they add beauty to messianic worship.

Messianic Jews seek to live consistently as Jews, as did the apostles (Acts 22:3f.; 1 Cor. 9:19f.). For many of us, this means the integrity of terminology and theological expression.

Terminology is important. While boldly affirming that we follow Yeshua, our Messiah and Lord, we do not call ourselves Christians, since most Jewish people associate Christians with centuries of persecution. In addition, we feel a deeper affinity to our first-century forebears than to the historical developments growing out of the first-century movement as they became formalized in the church. We call ourselves Messianic Jews, Jewish followers of the Messiah, Yeshua, whom we call the Messiah rather than the Christ, because “Christ” has no legitimate Jewish connotation. While affirming the unity of believers and the truth of the corporate body of Messiah, we call our gatherings “congregations” or “synagogues” (cf. the Greek of James 2:2) rather than churches because this better describes us. Some may consider these as semantic exercises or word games. But since words are the vehicles of communication, we must carefully choose those that will accurately reflect the realities we affirm, and be understood correctly within the Jewish community.

Our theological expressions also need to be relevant to the Jewish culture. Our formulations, therefore, bear a close kinship to those found in the Bible rather than those developed by historical Christendom. Thus we speak of God’s unique unity rather than the Trinity. The first-century expressions far better reflect and relate to Jewish ways of thinking and speaking.

Even with all this emphasis on Jewishness, we encourage Gentile involvement in our congregations and abhor any expressions of Jewish superiority. Many non-Jewish believers have responded to the challenge, have found a warm home among us, and have been most effective in communicating the biblical faith to Jewish people.

Because our messianic faith and our Jewish heritage and traditions are so organically connected, when properly understood, we need not feel torn between Yeshua and Jewishness.

JOHN FISCHER¹John Fischer is a vice-president of B’ rit Shalom, the messianic Jewish agency in Chicago. He is also a visiting faculty member in Jewish studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

We desire appreciation for our retention of the Jewish roots of our Christianity and the ways God used us, as a people, in working out man’s salvation.

Not long ago a girl came to us from a very troubled Jewish home. She had accepted Christ, had joined a Pentecostal church, hut was still very confused about her Jewish identity. We discovered, too, that she was diagnosed an incurable schizophrenic. She had undergone the voltage of shock treatments during ten years of intermittent hospitalization. She had lived in hospitals and was on such a high level of medication, her psychiatrist warned she would never be cured.

Her experience was amazing. We invited her into our congregation, which at that time was in Chicago, and the community reached out to her with open hearts and hands. We listened to her, prayed for her deliverance from satanic oppression. We prayed for her parents, who, when she had a relapse, blamed us for making her illness worse. The psychiatrist, however, convinced them to let her continue in the therapy she was receiving through fellowship with loving Jewish believers. It took time, but eventually she greeted the love and listening with noticeable health. When she was nearly free of all medication, she left for a year’s study at Moody Bible Institute, and was completely restored to her parents.

This true story, one of many in which our congregation has played a part, might have been just another page in the diary of some well-known, mainstream denominational church, whose fruits are known by traditions of soul winning and legacies of people healed of their hurts by faith in Christ and Christian discipleship. Instead, this page is from the diary of a modern messianic congregation—something many evangelicals might label “a bewildering territory.”

Messianic Jews understand this bewilderment. In many ways our recent history has contributed to it; we freely admit to our mistakes. In the past, we have conveyed a sense of superiority to other Christians. We have called ourselves rabbis without qualifying the term and responding adequately to the New Testament’s in junction against the title. We have even spoken as if we were just another branch of Judaism, neglecting to affirm our part in the universal body of believers. Let us seal these mistakes up in the dark dungeon of the past.

What modern Messianic Jews find difficult to understand is evangelicalism’s failure to appreciate our evangelicalism or, in the light of the history of the earliest churches as recorded in the Book of Acts, our deep loyalty to Jewishness (cf. Acts 21; 28:17).

To be sure, though our basic confession is in conformity with mainstream evangelical Protestant denominations, we maintain certain aspects of Jewish culture in our worship of the Messiah. Our congregations, for instance, do not reflect the usual evangelical symbolism. You will not see giant crosses protruding above a baptistry, nor will you see walls of stained glass pictures of Christ and his disciples. You will rather see a candle, symbolizing the eternal light of God, just above the ark containing the Torah. To the Messianic Jew, the inclusion and placement of the Torah (the body of Jewish scriptures) in no way symbolizes bondage to the law; it is actually an expression of Jewish affinity to the laws of God, but against the backdrop of God’s gracious favor in forgiving us through the Messiah’s atonement.

You will also find a departure from the traditional nineteenth-century hymns in favor of Scripture songs taken verbatim from Old and New Testaments. The songs are often chanted; many move rhythmically with fast-paced staccato character; some flow smoothly in slightly somber minor keys. Scripture reading, prayer, and Jewish elements such as the Kiddush—a blessing and prayer over wine—interspersed with the singing, provide the structure from which spontaneous praise and worship come. This traditional Jewish worship material coalesces in harmony and unity of spirit to point to the centrality of salvation in Jesus.

In affirming the basic evangelical concepts of the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith, the triune nature of God, the resurrection of Jesus, the Second Coming, and so on, we further incorporate our Jewish biblical heritage into our expression of faith. In affirming the triune nature of God, for instance, we are at pains to draw attention to God the Father in special ways. I once conducted a small survey as I listened to a Christian radio station. For every single instance God the Father was mentioned—in praise, adoration, or just conversation—Jesus was mentioned nine times. Yet when I searched the New Testament, I found that God was prominently mentioned as many times as Jesus. The Father was most often addressed in prayer and glorified through what he had done through his Son, and Jesus was considered the mediator as prayer was given in his name. Consequently, when Messianic Jews pray, sing, and worship, we frequently address the Father in an effort to establish a perspective toward the Trinity that is consistent with our heritage and with Scripture. In our worship we are theo-centric rather than Jesuscentric. We do not, of course, leave Jesus out of our worship; we try to maintain balance between the Father and the Son in our verbal addresses to God.

Another aspect of our Jewishness is our celebration of the Second Coming of Christ. We tie our hope to the orthodox Jewish hope that a personal Messiah is indeed coming. Our distinctive, of course, is that Messiah is coming—again; but the dynamics of the celebration remain basically Jewish. Also, concerning the authority of Scripture, the validity of our faith is sometimes questioned because we do not blatantly reject rabbinical teaching. The traditional Jewish community is under rabbinic authority almost the way a Catholic is under the authority of the Catholic church. Although Messianic Jews may learn certain things from rabbinical sources, the Bible is our final arbiter and all other teaching is measured according to how it aligns with Scripture.

Perhaps the affinity we feel so deeply for our biblical heritage is best seen in our celebrations of (1) the Passover, as the Exodus from Egypt as well as the death and resurrection of Christ; and (2) the Sabbath, as the memorial of Creation and the day of rest that is uniquely Jewish. Each activity, each observance, is carried out with the utmost sincerity, with hearts bursting in appreciation for our own heritage and destiny as a people.

During the Passover celebration we meet together in homes. We walk once again onto the pages of the Exodus and remind ourselves that it was the hand of God that delivered us from the mud and chains of bondage and made us a free people. The elements we eat further bring this to life: the apple mixed with cinnamon and wine reminds us of the color of mortar used in making bricks; the bitter herbs, usually horseradish, remind us of the bitterness of slavery; the parsley dipped in salt water reminds us first of tears, then of new life. Then we prepare for the Messiah’s supper, and bread is broken and later eaten in remembrance of the Messiah’s broken body. Finally, the cup symbolizing his sacrificial blood is consumed.

Our observance of the Sabbath is of a similar character as we share a meal together and conduct a service whose emphasis is to divide the Sabbath from the rest of the week, committing the entire day to the Lord. Spices that remind us of the sweetness of the Sabbath rest are passed around as we sing songs of praise. At the end we extinguish a candle in wine. We feel a certain sadness in the day’s ending, but joy that a new week is beginning.

What is the value of holding steadfastly to cultural practices that wind tortuously back through the centuries? It is first in relating culturally to our own people that we might win them to Jesus. Paul’s words ring in our ears with authenticity: “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews.”

To “become as a Jew” means to us continuing to value and take part in activities such as the bar mitzvah. This is a time of serious instruction for the child entering sexual maturity, a moment when he or she can contemplate responsibility before God in entering adulthood. In messianic congregations, the young person is taught what it means to be a follower of Jesus. If the youth does not understand the seriousness of this, we caution him to not go through the ceremony.

We have found the bar mitzvah to be a ministry to families of Jewish young people going through the ceremony. Recently, the son of one of our church elders went through his bar mitzvah. This elder had been branded the family black sheep for his acceptance of Jesus, and he doubted the family would even attend the ceremony; they seriously mistrusted his new-found faith values. At the last minute they did attend and were softened by the warmth and fellowship of the congregation. Later, as the family prepared to leave, the old Jewish grandfather said, “I thought you had forsaken your Jewish heritage in accepting Jesus as the Messiah. I never thought it was possible to accept Jesus and to be Jewish. You have proved otherwise. You are more Jewish than the rest of your family.” There was a great deal of rejoicing. We have since continued to share the Messiah with this family and are praying for their salvation.

It is a rock of truth that non-Jewish believers can witness to traditional Jews without success—until they are blue in the face. Perhaps this is what prompted the School of World Missions at Fuller Theological Seminary to state: “We heartily encourage Jewish believers to retain their Jewish heritage, culture, religious practices and marriage customs within the context of sound biblical theology, expressing Old and New Testament truth. Their freedom in Christ to do this cannot but enrich the church in our day.” Just weeks ago a middle-aged Jewish woman came to us on the invitation of one of our members. She had been witnessed to for five months in a weekly, non-Jewish Bible study. She told her friends at the study, “This is very nice; I appreciate what you’re doing.” But because there was no Jewish significance in what they were doing, she left the group without accepting Jesus. When she saw the vibrant fellowship among our people, along with our reverence for Jewish things, she gave her life to the Lord in less than two hours.

As Jews, therefore, we Messianic Jews discover that we are better able to lead Jews to an acceptance of Jesus as Messiah and as Lord and Savior. Nevertheless, our Jewishness is by no means an evangelistic gimmick. We choose to remain Jews because we love the Jewish people and wish to identify with them. Indeed, we find our own identity not just as Christians, but also as Jews and, therefore, most fully as Christian Jews. Our own Jewishness thus leads us to a heartfelt identification with all the elements of history and personality that have produced the Jewish people. One has to be Jewish to relate in total compassion to the hearts of people who have been through the Holocaust. The love of the Messiah does not lessen our Jewishness. Rather, it actually strengthens it and deepens our love for our people and the cultural heritage which has contributed to our Jewish identity in this world.

Are we a legitimate part of the body of Christ in the practical eyes of evangelical believers?

Our congregations are growing significantly. We are seeing many come to New Testament faith in Jesus. Our people are being discipled in the Scriptures. When someone invites Christ into his life, the new believer is immediately taken in hand by a member who spends time each week with him in Bible study, prayer, witnessing, and just doing things together in the development of a biblical lifestyle. We practice water baptism, which we call Mikvah. In one 13-month period we saw 53 people baptized.

We have Gentile believers in our congregation, and all non-Jewish members are treated on an equal basis with Jews. We continue to invite non-Jews into our fellowship as well. We encourage our people to visit other local churches and to take part in weekly fellowship groups with other believers and pastors. We do this with regularity, as our main fellowship takes place on Saturday.

Finally, although we believe in our calling to maintain our identity as Jews, we do not see our identity as having anything to do with our salvation, which is solely by grace. And we do not expect Jewish conformity from the Christian church at large, although we desire a measure of understanding and appreciation for our Jewish roots of Christianity.

In his album Saved, Jewish believer Bob Dylan cries out, “There’s only one road, and it leads to Calvary.” Messianic Jews know the terrain of that road, its lumps, its bends, its detours. We have made our mistakes; what we need most now is the encouragement and prayerful support of the entire Christian community. In your prayers, consider especially these areas of need for Messianic Jews:

1. Capable leaders and church planters. We have new congregations that do not have any idea of congregational life, discipline, and polity. We are not like Presbyterian or Methodist churches with handy books of procedure in our pockets.

2. Biblical education materials that are sensitive to the Jewish culture. We hope eventually to write our own, or to see a curriculum publisher restructure materials to suit our needs.

3. Continued understanding by traditional Jews and Jewish leaders. We are sometimes accused of adulterating traditional Jewish practices by adhering to them in the context of our Christian faith. When we drink the cup symbolizing Messiah’s blood, for instance, we are said to make the cup mean something it was never intended to mean. Pray that we will learn to cope with such tensions—there are many for a Jew who has committed his life to the Lord.

Sometimes we are accused of deception—of pretending to be Jews only to win unsuspecting Jews to Christianity. To this we can only reply that we too think this would be despicable. We call ourselves Messianic Jews because we are Jews, we treasure our Jewishness, and we wish to remain Jews. We are also Christians and we treasure our New Testament faith. Whatever may be said of Christianity as developed in Christendom through the centuries, we find nothing in the New Testament that conflicts with our Jewishness—only that which strengthens and reinforces our Jewish identity and our love for Jews and our Jewish heritage.

There was a young man who accepted Jesus, whose father made him move out of the house because he thought he had thrown off his Jewish heritage by becoming a Christian. The father would have nothing to do with our congregation; he wouldn’t even talk to us. The young man was absolutely torn between his family and our community. Finally, the father told his son, “If you want to please me, you’re going to have to go to Israel to study” under a specific program to convince people to desert their Messianic beliefs. To maintain the dialogue with his father, the son went to Israel to study under this system, which absolutely downplays the New Testament.

The son has retained his faith. Yet, in pleasing his father, he is torn by the forces seeking to pull him away from that faith in Messiah. This is an example of extreme tension. However, we can say with joy that most families have eventually become reconciled to the Messianic faith of their members due to their Jewish fidelity. In some cases Messianic Judaism has been the means of reuniting torn families. May this be the case in the future.

Individual treatment and a high regard for human dignity mark the best nursing homes.

In 1965, the u.s. Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid legislation, and the nursing home industry boomed overnight. Motel chains snapped up independent pursing homes in large numbers, and stocks issued by nursing home chains rocketed on Wall Street. Financial analysts advised their customers to jump in, and they issued profit predictions of 20 percent or more. From 1960 through 1976, nursing home expenditures rose from $500 million to $10.6 billion, and the number of homes soared by 140 percent.

The rest, as they say, is history. Throughout the seventies, newspaper after newspaper carried scandalous tales of financial fraud and horrible mistreatment of nursing home residents, the result of unscrupulous owners trying to increase profits by cutting corners. Even before the Medicaid era, old-age homes were not generally regarded as gracious places to be. In many minds that image still endures: one of a large, white, ramshackle house converted for the purpose, with old folks whiling away the hours on the front porch, watching the world go by.

It’s scant wonder, then, that many people are nervous at the prospect of what lies ahead when they can no longer care for themselves, or that children feel guilty to find themselves even thinking that a nursing home might be the best place for an aged parent. This situation is a tragedy in itself, for across the country, Christian organizations, mostly church denominations, are running nursing homes and retirement centers that are models of love and devotion, and exemplify the best of what Christians are called to do here on earth. Most of these enterprises belong to the minority of homes that function on a not-for-profit basis.

Marvin Johnson operates Fairhaven Christian Home in Rockford, Illinois, owned by the Evangelical Free Church, in a modern, clean, pleasant-looking building. Said Johnson, “People say to me time and again: ‘Marv, if I had known it was going to be like this, I would have come here five years ago.’ ” Johnson and the administrators of other such homes are unanimous in their belief that the public, Christians included, have woeful misconceptions about what their enterprises are really like—both because the unsavory images from the past still linger, and because some homes are still far short of what they could be. Said one director of a well-regarded home: “I don’t remember ever reading an article saying that a retirement home is a good thing. Not ever.”

The fact is, many nursing homes are no longer just nursing homes. The trend is toward “continuing care,” especially among the nonprofit homes ran by Christian organizations. If you enter when you’re healthy—and the cost is considerable—you’re cared for when you’re sick, even if you can no longer afford it.

The Calvary Fellowship Homes of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is one such continuing care center. It is basically a retirement community of apartments and cottages, as well as a nursing facility. The administrator, George Baumgartner, left a career in research chemistry to manage the center, because he saw it as a ministry to which he was called. He said, “People are gradually learning that retirement homes aren’t just places you go to when you’re sick and need help.… Most of the people who enter retirement homes want a place where they can live and be happy and perform volunteer service for the Lord and still be healthy, but have the assurance that should they need [nursing care] assistance, they’ll be taken care of.”

Like Marvin Johnson, Baumgartner is convinced that it makes a difference to run a retirement home as a Christian ministry, not simply as a business. “I have people who walk into our home who can sense a difference, and the only difference is the Christian influence,” he said. “The building itself is certainly not elaborate, and we [administrators] all hire the same types of people.” He recalls a meeting of the state nursing home board where a speaker said, “All of you here look upon this as a job, as a way of making a living.” That struck Baumgartner: “I had to say to myself. No, that’s not the case. I and one other person on the board at the time entered this not to get jobs, because we already had jobs, but as a ministry. That’s the difference.”

A lot can happen when that attitude is brought to nursing care. The president of a large construction company recently wrote a letter to Franklyn Dyrness, president of the Quarryville (Pennsylvania) Presbyterian Home, just after the contractor had visited the home. The man wrote: “I was much impressed by your personal concern for all your guests. You knew each and every one by name, and you were able to communicate with them in some kind of personal pleasantry.” The man then said that his mother-in-law had once been confined in a nursing home, and he and his wife visited her weekly. “When I saw the desperate condition of some of my dear, old adult friends, it upset me tremendously.” He confessed, “In fact, I became fearful of growing old.… For some reason, the kindness you shared with your people that day has changed my attitude considerably. I feel now that there will always be someone who will care. Just maybe, there is not anything too bad about growing old. In fact, I think maybe it can become very peaceful and rewarding.”

The Quarryville Presbyterian Home is widely respected, and Dymess has run it ever since it opened 33 years ago (he recently turned over the administrator’s title to his young assistant, G. Keith Mitchell, Jr.). The home is not connected with a Presbyterian denomination, although its board members, who serve without pay, are all from two conservative branches of the church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It has space for 375 residents, making it larger than the average, and it is well off financially, having just completed a $2 million expansion without borrowing.

The home has no fund-raising drives, doesn’t advertise, and has no capital debt. Ask Dyrness to explain it, and you’ll get a sermon—and a pretty good one: “It’s a dedication, and if it’s anything less than that, there is something wrong with it. This is the Lord’s work, and he will be exalted through it. When we started, we didn’t have the money or the skill to cause us to take credit for it now. We’ve seen God come to our rescue over and over again.”

Dyrness operates on the principle that people must feel important to feel happy, and his efforts to accommodate the residents are obvious. One man who entered the home to retire had a well-equipped machine shop in his basement. Dyrness invited him to bring his tools along, and the shop was set up in one of the garages. Next to the machine shop is a mechanic’s shop, and it is the province of another resident who had retired from his job as a master mechanic for a Cadillac dealer. The men work on useful projects at their own pace, and they are paid by the home for what they do. One lady handles all the bookkeeping for a denominational insurance program at a fraction of what that service would cost otherwise. The result is less expensive insurance as well as therapy for the woman. One man with a love for flowers asked if he could have a patch of ground on which to raise a few, and Dyrness promptly bought 130 rosebushes for him. The man tended those bushes lovingly until he died, and now someone else who loves roses has assumed responsibility for them.

Dyrness said many people have approached him about establishing homes like Quarryville Presbyterian elsewhere. He’s been offered several sites: a fruit farm in Michigan, a mansion with 60 acres in Baltimore, a building near the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, as well as a site near Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, offered by two businessmen who assured him that money was no object. Dyrness turned them all down—although he can envision more homes like his around the country. It’s just that he is convinced money is not the key to a successful Christian retirement home. The key is dedication; that is, men who believe they have been called by God for the purpose of tending his aging sheep. “Show me a person who has given his life to God’s work, and I’ll show you a successful person,” he said. “God’s work, done in God’s way, and done to God’s glory, will never lack for supply.”

The costs of retiring in a Christian home are high, as they are everywhere, and it is quite obviously not something everyone can afford. The smallest “independent living” arrangement at the Fairhaven Christian Home in Rockford is an 11′6″ by 10′10″ living room-bedroom combination with a shared half bath. It requires a “founder’s fee” (a one-time lump sum payment) of $8,000 and a monthly charge of $330, which can rise as costs rise. The smallest apartment has a living room and a bedroom, each 10′6″ by 10′8″, plus a kitchenette and a full bath. For that, the founder’s fee is $18,700 and $420 a month, or, for two people, $23,500 and $755 a month. These figures rise with the apartment size. The fee in the home’s nursing center is the customary monthly charge plus an extra $15 a day. Fairhaven’s fees are actually lower than at many other homes, but the fee structures are similar elsewhere.

At Quarryville, however, financial arrangements are altogether different. Residents pay $500 entrance expense, plus a monthly room or apartment charge ($275 for the smallest room), and in addition, they turn over all other financial assets to the home, according to a legal contract with an escape clause. Those assets are pooled and invested, and interest of 8 to 9 percent is paid. When the resident dies, the assets are distributed to the heirs less 5 percent for each year the resident has been at the home up to four years. During the contract period, the money actually remains the property of the resident, and is available for his use should the need arise.

In 1977, a book titled Too Old, Too Sick, Too Bad. by Sen, Frank Moss and his assistant, Val Halamandaris, was published. Moss headed a Senate subcommittee that investigated nursing home abuses brought to light in newspaper stories during the seventies, and the subcommittee was able to substantiate the astonishing extent to which elderly nursing home patients were made to suffer at the hands of nursing home owners whose primary motivation was profit. The authors wrote about the investigation in their book of more than 300 pages; it took only two pages to explain what makes a good nursing home. Part of that conclusion says: “The lesson appears to be that it is an intangible—esprit de corps—a sense of motivation manifested in individualized treatment and maximizing human dignity that marks the best nursing homes. Neither this esprit nor tender loving care can be imposed by government fiat. It must be the result of the desire and commitment on the part of nursing home personnel. All American homes can provide superior care. All that is required is the will to do so.”

Even if they had been trying to do it, the authors could not have painted a more accurate picture of homes operated on Christian principles. How could there possibly be a better way to “maximize” human dignity than simply to believe that people are made in the image of God, and that, therefore, their dignity is beyond measure? What better motivation can there be for “tender loving care” than the belief that when a patient dies, he is merely being transferred from nursing care to the Lord’s care?

“Many times,” said Marvin Johnson of Fairhaven, “I have been at the bedside of a dying person, and I’ve found there is nothing more beautiful than to be there, with someone I’ve known for five years or so, and to have them say thanks, that they appreciated so much what the home has meant for them, and to know that they’re going to be with the Lord. It’s an experience I’ll never forget. It makes me feel that my life has a real purpose, that society has a real purpose.”

Such things have even been known to turn nursing home owners into committed Christians. That was the case with Clifford Fischer, who became administrator of the Brookside Manor Home in Overbrook, Kansas, in 1965, at the tender age of 23. He said that even at that age he feared death, and in his job he naturally confronted it frequently. Said Fischer, “I had the opportunity to be with a lot of Christian people when they faced death, and I just didn’t understand how they could have the peace they had. It was out of those experiences that I started searching, and I ultimately came into contact with a young man who had the same peace these older people had. Through a sharing time with him, and after about seven years of Bible study, I finally came to realize what that peace was. Of course it was knowing Jesus as my personal Savior.”

Although Brookside Manor did not start out to be a Christian nursing home, it surely is one now, said Fischer. He owns the home, and it is run for profit, so by no means are all profit-making homes unsatisfactory places. But, says Fischer, “I hope that people really see something different about us than they see in the so-called secular world, because we really do care for our people. I’ll go out of my way to demonstrate to them how good God has been to me, and how in turn he expects me to be the same way toward other people.” Fischer sees his business as a missionary field that God has given to him, along with gifts of administrative ability and compassion that enable him to run it successfully.

Most of the church-sponsored retirement and nursing homes in the country are operated by mainstream Protestant denominations. Evangelical churches have not entered the field in anywhere near the same numbers. One reason for that, according to Bernard King, executive director of a large retirement center in Florida owned by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, is that these churches have seen evangelism and missions work as their calling, rather than social needs, such as caring for the elderly.

King manages Shell Point Village in Fort Myers, which has about a thousand residents. He said his denomination is happy to have it, but “I don’t think the Alliance now would ever spend the money or the organizational energy to start a place like Shell Point.… This kind of social program does not have the highest priority according to the goals that are being looked upon in the 1980s, because we feel that God has given us an evangelical missionary goal.”

Nonetheless, it is safe to say that conservative Christian churches will be faced ever more directly with the burden of caring for their aging members, if only because the elderly are growing faster as a group than any other segment of the population. But beyond that, it seems that evangelicals, who have captured the attention of a cynical nation in the last year or so, will be challenged by the doubters and the skeptics with the very challenge thrown down by James—the challenge to prove their faith by their good works. But perhaps most importantly, as the building contractor in Pennsylvania found out, the atmosphere of a Christian retirement home can dissipate the greatest fear that possesses people, the fear of dying.

MOTHER AND CHILD

Mother, my most recent child,

Wrapped in wool and scanning space,

Is to age unreconciled.

She who reared me, taught me grace

And thoughtfulness, commands me now

With strident voice and stormy face.

She who loved my gifts is slow

To use and quick to criticize

The offerings I now bestow.

Discontentment fills her eyes.

Age and loneliness combine

To shake her family with surprise.

We who love will not resign

Her failing self to others’ care;

Her petulance serves to refine.

She who nurtured us with prayer,

Shared our sorrows and our bliss,

She was gentle once and fair.

What trick of motherhood is this

Which overwhelms a child with guilt

And makes her offspring feel remiss?

Self-pity is by illness built.

My mother’s gone—this is a child

Who needs my love. Lord, as Thou wilt.

Grant me patience, manner mild;

This charge I will accept from Thee,

To tend with love my mother-child

Until she gains eternity.

GERALDINE CRAIG

Crisis Intervention: Coffee And Cake

The other day I completed one of those self-analysis surveys in a psychology magazine, and I discovered I was going through a mid-life crisis. I casually mentioned it to my wife and she replied, “I didn’t even know you were in mid-life.” So much for domestic sympathy.

“Why not throw the magazine into the trash can?” I asked myself. Then I answered myself: “Won’t do any good. I would just go looking for it, only to discover it had been burned, and then I would feel worse. Imagine having my mid-life crisis go up in smoke!”

No, the only manly thing to do was to take myself by the nape of the neck, shake myself soundly, and face my crisis honestly. I did this two or three times, and spent the rest of the morning lying under a deep-heat, infrared lamp. Next time I will shake myself from some other part of my anatomy.

Finally my spouse got the message. “So you’re going through a crisis! So what? Being in the ministry is one crisis after another anyway. First it was getting into seminary. (How did you get in, by the way?) Then it was paying for seminary. Then it was getting a church. Then it was staying in a church. So, what’s one more little crisis. You’ll live.”

Alas, she did not understand. This was a mid-life crisis, totally unlike any other crisis in a man’s life. I could never again be in this same crisis, and it had taken me many years to get there. I had to savor it and make the most of it. It would be tragic to come this far and not enjoy my own crisis.

I sat in my favorite rocking chair and pondered the mysteries of mid-life. I wished Gary Collins or Jay Adams were there to assure me that everything would be all right. I was wondering if anybody really understood.

About midway through my mid-life meditation, I smelled fresh coffee being brewed, and I heard a voice call. “Care for a cup of coffee? Mrs. Johnson brought us one of her famous Swedish coffee cakes.” Somebody did understand! A cup of coffee, a loaf of coffee cake, and thou!

Some crises are easier to get over than others.

EUTYCHUS X

“A Cup Of Cold Water”

I say “Yes, and amen!” to your editorial of March 13, “Public Aid and the Churches’ Duties.” Of course, there are those who may try to take advantage of the church’s generosity. And we don’t want to equate the church with a religious welfare agency. Despite the pitfalls, the church should be encouraged to care for the needy, especially those of the “household of faith.”

Case in point: our little church (less than 100 members) has managed to distribute several thousand dollars in the last few years through a special “prosperity fund.” We also collect for weekly food baskets.

Offering the Living Water and “a cup of cold water” is not an either/or proposition. It is both/and!

RICK A. SANDERS

Cantonment, Fla.

Too Favorable

In the article on the retirement of The Way’s leader and founder, Victor Paul Wierwille [News, March 13], you devoted nearly 11 column inches to almost praising the accomplishments of The Way and only 3 to a very inadequate refutation of The Way’s doctrines.

I have dedicated my life to researching and preaching against such groups and I can honestly say that this article is much too positive in their favor. This group is most definitely a cult. Their teachings are outright blasphemous, not mere “deviations” as your article puts it.

TIM BRIGGS

Lexington, Ky.

Is That All?

How you, Eutychus [March 13], underestimate the pill-swallowing abilities of us Americans. Only seven million aspirin tablets a year?

DAVID OLSON

Monrovia, Calif.

Delighted And Bewildered

The article on Dr. Henry was excellent [“The Concerns and Considerations …” March 13]. He should be interviewed like that once a year. He always seems to have a broad and balanced perspective which he articulates clearly, forthrightly, and sensitively. The only thing that could have improved the interview was his own definition of “evangelical” for the record.

MARK D. DATTOLI

Elmhurst, Ill.

Carl Henry’s usually flawless research broke down significantly in his references to Moral Majority. Henry says we claim a “block of 30 million votes.” We have never claimed that, nor have we claimed we were solely responsible for the outcome of last November’s elections. We have never promoted a “Christian litmus test.” Other groups have, but not Moral Majority, which is political, not religious in its make-up. Since we do not endorse candidates, we had nothing to say in the national office concerning Abscam congressmen or those caught in homosexual acts.

CAL THOMAS

Vice President, Communications

Moral Majority

Lynchburg, Va.

Was the interview with Henry written for us ordinary laymen or for overeducated, abstruse thinkers with a string of Ph.D.’s after their names? For example, in response to the question “What religious trends do you consider most important?” some of his answers were: “The continuing deterioration of older liberal theology and its evident drift toward secular humanism”; and “The vulnerability to attack and negation of conventional ethics wedded to naturalistic metaphysics.”

There’s no excuse for a religious leader writing for the average Christian in such a confusing, excessively profound style. I’m just a plain, blunt man, as are most of your readers, who were probably as bewildered as I was after reading his views.

GEORGE COOKLIS

Corry, Pa.

Children Of The Light?

The idea that puberty might be postponed by sleeping in total darkness sounds just about as preposterous as the notions that sexual drive can be cooled by cold showers or that nocturnal emissions can be prevented by not sleeping between flannel sheets [“ ‘Premature’ Puberty: Advice to Parents” March 13]. But stranger things have been true, though they deserve documentation. So, could Donald Joy please identify the research behind and source of such a theory to establish its credibility before parents frighten their little kids by turning out their Mickey Mouse night lights or chase them away from the comforting glow of the fire (where they’ve slept for milleniums) or shield them from moonbeams.

DAVE JACKSON

Evanston, Ill.

Find full documentation on “light” in “Trust Your Body Rhythms,” by Gay Gaer Luce (Psychology Today, April 1975, pp. 52–53)—Eds.

Growing Up

Christians have too readily assumed the sequence of education, emancipation, and then marriage. Now Koteskey [“Growing Up Too Late, Too Soon,” March 13] and Joy have challenged this sequence with sober observations that should strike a responsive chord in those not too far removed from their own adolescence. To those who respond, “Let them take cold showers,” it should be pointed out that the scriptural way of escape (1 Cor. 10:13) from lust is 1 Corinthians 7:9, and that this verse is not restricted to college graduates over 21.

Besides the generally wise course of giving children real work and responsibilities, two modern fallacies need to be confronted if our biologically mature children are to be ready for “early marriage” The first is that the meaning of life is found between the bedsheets. The second, which is more broadly applicable, is that love is emotional rather than volitional, and that if the feelings pass then the will is powerless to carry on.

Parents and the church should consciously seize the many opportunities offered by cinema, television, and literature, and use them to label these assumptions for the folly they are. With the stars out of their eyes and room made for serious commitment, there should be no reason why today’s late teens cannot form perfectly sound marriages with fellow believers.

ROGER W. BENNETT

Bloomington, Ind.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that adolescence as we experience it in our culture is a rather recent phenomenon. My thinking is that it has the effect of extending childhood far beyond historical norms. I was not sure that we recognized that as a society and as Christians. The insight has become my personal guiding concept in developing relationships with the youth of my congregation and now my own children entering their teen years.

I was certain that my ideas were not original, but until now I have never read anything on the subject. It appeared there was nothing available. Apparently that is no longer the case. I would appreciate very much the opportunity to keep in touch with what I hope will be a growing literature on the subject.

REV. KEITH MATTSON

First Baptist Church

Chisholm, Minn.

Fraud Exposed

Recently my attention was called to the March 13 issue which included an excellent exposé of a virulent, slanderous anti-Catholic publication [“Jack Chick’s Anti-Catholic Alberto Comic Book Is Exposed as Fraud”]. It is unfortunate that there are men who will stoop to such lies in an attempt to defame the Catholic church.

There was a statement in Alberto which is an exceptionally blatant lie. It seems that Chick stated that [Saint Ignatius] Loyola, the founder of the Catholic Jesuit Society was, … a member of the Adumbrados, or the Illuminati …” Had Chick investigated, he should have learned that Loyola died some 200 years before the founding of the infamous Illuminati.

ANTONIO N. PAOLANTONIO

Reseda, Calif.

As a former Catholic priest and now director of Mission to Catholics International, which specializes in effective Roman Catholic evangelism, I read with interest the report concerning “Alberto.”

It is my conviction that faith doesn’t come from sensational stories, but by the hearing of God’s Word (Rom. 10:17). Both Alberto and Double Cross lack solid Bible meat and are somewhat inaccurate regarding Catholic teaching.

“Alberto” has deliberately avoided fellowship and communication with at least three ministries to Catholics. Of the pastors we have contacted, all have reservations about the magazines concerning his life.

The Catholic hierarchy categorically denies that “Alberto” was ever ordained a Catholic priest. It would be impossible to cover up all evidence of such facts. A lot of people. Catholics and non-Catholics, have been hurt by this bogus priest.

BARTHOLOMEW F. BREWER

San Diego, Calif.

I am very disappointed to read your hatchet job on Jack Chick. Chick is certainly not perfect. I have been concerned that he has become overly preoccupied with the evils of Catholicism of late, but your article gives the appearance that the Church of the Inquistion has no faults and Mr. Chick has no good points.

STEVE BYAS

Sapulpa, Okla.

Thank you very much for your report on Alberto Rivera. The Mechanicsburg Ministerium made a statement last December concerning a local bookstore selling the Chick materials. The bookstore still sells the materials and does not believe the articles that present him as a fake. It is sad that some in the name of Christianity believe this kind of material.

I know that the hate letters will start. I have a collection, because I was quoted in several newspapers speaking against the publications.

REV. CHARLES D. HILLER

First United Methodist Church

Mechanicsburg, Pa.

Appeal For Discernment

Kuhn’s article, “Out-of-Body Experiences: Misplaced Euphoria” [March 13], disturbed me a great deal for two reasons. First, he said that “all who take the Christian message seriously should be interested in the phenomenon of death, including no doubt, researches into out-of-body experiences of those resuscitated after clinical death.” Studies in this field often are nothing more than research into the occult. To suggest that all should be interested in such research is ill advised, as very few are prepared to deal with the vast implications. These studies can be likened to the field of parapsychology, which is basically a pseudoscience researching the realm of the occult.

Second, before they attribute more credibility to their findings than is due, the readers should be aware that some scholars believe Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody are involved in the occult. They are not exactly unbiased in their conclusions.

Christians need to be aware of the growing research into the realm of the occult that is being done in the name of science. The impact has been so dramatic that even religious writers are now proclaiming the merits of such work to the extent of recommending that one’s ESP abilities be developed.

DON ROGERS

Huntingdon Valley, Pa.

Letters are welcome. Only a selection can be published; all are subject to condensation. Please address letters to “Eutychus and His Kin.”

At this issue goes to press, Americans are shaking themselves in disbelief at violence that has once again erupted against the president. But despite their shock and outrage, most citizens reacted to the tragedy with maturity and understanding. Years ago President Truman pointed out that almost anyone could assassinate an American president if he didn’t mind dying in the attempt. It is the price we pay for living in a free and open society with an open presidency. No doubt some things need to be done: security could be tightened; gun control might help; court delays must be shortened; sentences should be more consistent; repeated criminals must be denied their freedom with long, perhaps life, sentences. But in a free society, we cannot eliminate the possibility of assassination. We simply do not want to give up our treasured freedom, our open society, and a president who mingles easily with the people—all values for which we have been willing to risk our president’s assassination. Granted these values, there is no way we can prevent a determined lunatic or a clever criminal from shooting the president.

In this issue, we join with all Jews in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The genocidal murders by Hitler and his minions and the attempted assassination of the president of the United States by an isolated criminal or a demented man (whose personal moral responsibility only God can judge) are both tragedies; but there the similarity ends. The latter is the consequence of a deliberate choice on the part of the American people and their president to preserve a certain style of government and social freedom; now we are sad and question our corporate wisdom. The former is the product of ugly hate fostered over generations. It climaxed in a moral stench that nauseates the human soul. We recoil from it in shock and anger and the firm resolve, with God’s help, to do all we can to keep it from ever happening again.

On quite a different level, Tom Minnery presents the results of his investigation into Christian retirement homes. Retirement centers have become big business in recent years. Unfortunately, some have also become the object of scandalous tales of fraud and mistreatment; but many more have proved to be havens of loving, mutual care, where elderly people may live out their days in dignity and useful ministry.

Kingdom Living Today

Kingdom Citizens, by John Driver (Herald Press, 1980, 160 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Robert W. Lyon, professor of New Testament interpretation, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

The author, of Mennonite heritage, has given us a first-rate introduction and study guide to the Sermon on the Mount. Throughout the book we see clearly the concerns of the peace church tradition and its modern expression focusing on the church as community, living out the features of Jubilee. It is all done without special pleading.

Driver writes with a deep concern for the continued viability of the church, which may be summarized, in his words: “If the Christian church wants to survive the remaining years of the twentieth century as a messianic community which points to the kingdom, it has no other alternative than the one which the primitive apostolic community took: begin with the righteousness of the kingdom which is summed up in the Sermon on the Mount” (p. 41).

The value system that comes to expression in the Sermon is so radical that attempts to graft it to common systems of values result in a repudiation of it. The Sermon is an alternative, and Driver attempts to set forth that alternative in clear and irenic terms.

The opening chapter sets the Sermon on the Mount within the framework of Matthew’s gospel; the author works especially with the material preceding the Sermon to show how Matthew describes the messianic king as servant, healer, and one who invites people to a new way. The key is repentance—a returning to the roots of the nation’s salvation. A second, brief (too brief to be more than marginally helpful) chapter attempts to treat the various ways the Sermon has been handled throughout the history of the church. The rest of the book is an interesting and significant commentary on the Sermon, which reveals the author’s concern that the church live out the “missionary visibility of the messianic community” (p. 101). Each chapter concludes with a number of questions to be used in group discussion. The questions are themselves a significant part of the book.

Occasionally, very occasionally, the book is marred by facile equations as when (p. 127) he speaks of “insurance” and “savings” as examples of our concern and anxiety for tomorrow (Matt. 6:34). Also, though very rarely. Driver lapses into unnecessarily emotional language (“absolutely ridiculous.” p. 43).

This is a timely book representing what may very well be the coming to life again of the old radical life of the early church. The amount and weightiness of this whole genre may be the most significant happening on the evangelical scene today.

Jesus’ Authentic Parables?

Through Peasant Eyes: More Lucan Parables, Their Culture and Style, by Kenneth E. Bailey (Eerdmans, 1980, 208 pp., $15.95), is reviewed by David M. Scholer, associate professor of New Testament, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

Kenneth E. Bailey’s Through Peasant Eyes is a sequel to his Poet and Peasant: A Literary Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke (1976).

Bailey’s major point is that the original Palestinian character and theological meaning of the parables is often lost to us because of our cultural distance. A professor at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon, Bailey proposes to close this gap by interpreting the parables with reference to present-day Middle Eastern Arab culture (in isolated conservative villages), 24 Syriac and Arabic translations of the New Testament from the second century to the present, several relatively unknown Arab Christian commentaries from medieval to modern times, and literature contemporary with the New Testament. He also stresses the importance of the literary structure of the parables and emphasizes what he has described as the “parabolic ballad.” Bailey believes that what he recovers are the authentic parables of Jesus of Nazareth.

While aware of the problematic character of his approaches, Bailey assumes that the Middle Eastern culture reflected in his sources is in basic continuity with first-century A.D. Palestinian culture. He argues, correctly, that we all make cultural assumptions in reading the parables; thus, he pleads, why not make the ones he suggests since they are plausible and probable?

Nevertheless, uncertainties do remain. The proper context for interpreting the parables of Jesus is certainly first-century Palestinian Judaism and the prophetic-theological intentionality of Jesus. Bailey believes his methods get us to this context, but he offers too little by way of historical and methodological controls. Further, he consciously sets aside the redactional issues of the intention of the Lucan evangelist. However, the task of interpreting the parables as we have them in their written gospel contexts does not allow for such comfortable simplicity. Bailey’s “parabolic ballad” appears rather strained as he applies it to the text as we have it.

Bailey’s treatment of ten Lucan passages does provide much of interest and value in interpreting the parables. The book is engaging and should be consulted. Apart from the serious cautions already noted, however, one can also question the details and “features” in many places. For example, in his discussion of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14) Bailey makes much of the Middle East culture in terms of the phrase “he beat his breast” (pp. 153–54). However, what is pertinent here was already noted, for example, by Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (second ed., p. 143), from ancient sources. Bailey’s discussion of the phrase “have mercy on me” makes a useful lexical point, but overplays its significance.

Although this book makes no significant contribution to Lucan studies, it should be consulted in studying the parables, but always with caution and testing with reference to other studies and commentaries.

Romans In Scholarly Debate

Commentary on Romans, by Ernst Käsemann (Eerdmans, 1980, 427 pp., $22.50), is reviewed by J. Julius Scott, Jr., professor of Bible and theology, Wheaton College Graduate School, Wheaton, Illinois.

The Epistle to the Romans has attracted the expository skills of the small and the great alike. Ernst Käsemann is one of the greats. The professor emeritus of New Testament at Tübingen has been among the leaders of German biblical scholarship since midcentury. In a 1953 lecture he altered radically the direction of subsequent research into the life of Jesus. In this volume, a translation of the fourth German edition (1980), he brings the fruits of his lifetime of study to bear upon Paul’s premier epistle.

Käsemann’s methodology dictates that “nothing from historical scholarship that seems essential is to be withheld” (p. 7). Consequently, the commentary is filled with references to relevant historical, cultural, and theological data from the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds, references to and interchange with contemporary scholarly debate, as well as discussions of the grammatical and theological elements of the text.

The commentary proceeds with a section of discussion that centers on what Käsemann believes to be the major theological issues, the most important being the righteousness of God. He recognizes the centrality of justification in Paul’s thought but departs from past understandings of the term, seeing it rather in contrast to the “general Jewish intensification of the Torah” evident in such sources as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Käsemann writes from a theological perspective quite different from that of American evangelicalism. The format and style of the volume make it difficult to read, yet it is informative and provocative. Earlier editions have already secured the work’s place as a standard among German works on Romans; this translation will do the same for it in the English-speaking world.

Getting The Idea Across

Biblical Preaching, by Haddon W. Robinson (Baker, 1980, 224 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Kent Hughes, pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois.

Prior to becoming president of Denver Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in 1979, Haddon Robinson served for 19 years as professor of homiletics and chairman of the pastoral ministries department at Dallas Theological Seminary. This would suggest that what he has to say about preaching should be of note. Biblical Preaching, the Development of Expository Messages does not disappoint.

The present regrettable tendency to imagine expository preaching to be little more than the stringing together of verse-by-verse homilies finds no support in the author’s scheme. Robinson believes each exposition must be built on a single exegetical idea which, through the use of developmental questions, must then become the homiletical idea. This, he argues, is the essential task of exposition. Specifically, he says, “Because the homiletical idea emerges after an intensive study of a passage and extensive analysis of the audience, getting that idea and stating it creatively is the most difficult step in sermon preparation.” Robinson believes preachers should think, and that is the overall theme of the book.

The virtues of Biblical Preaching are several. Robinson writes with a clear, bright style, which is well because he believes that for the preacher “clarity is a moral matter.” His wide acquaintance with homiletical literature and pastoral writings is evident, not only from his well-argued thesis, but from the abundant illustrations and vignettes that will delight the homiletical heart. Robinson is something of a phrase-maker himself; for example, “… sermons spoken in a stained-glass voice”; “A mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew.”

Robinson’s sermonic method is remarkably complete, though it is confined to less than 230 pages. The exercises at chapter ends should prove helpful to homiletical teachers as well as those who would like to refresh themselves in the basics. Biblical Preaching will be a welcome addition to many pastors’ libraries.

Moneythink In America

Wealth Addiction, by Philip Slater, (E. P. Dutton, 1980, 210 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Reed Jolley, a pastor of Santa Barbara Community Church, Santa Barbara, California.

In the midst of world-wide recession, the affluent Occident continues its quest for the “good life.” Four of our nation’s bestselling books teach the reader how he or she can become wealthy in spite of coming hard times. The business sections of local newspapers are replete with advertisements promising double-digit interest rates to even the short-term, small investor. College students are giving up their love (?) for the liberal arts, opting instead for marketable degrees. Against the current fiscal mentality stands Philip Slater with his latest book, Wealth Addiction.

Wealth Addiction is something of an economic pot pourri, including everything from an explanation of what money is (an unreal entity) to a psychology of economics and a humanistic plea for simple living.

In the first chapter, “What Is Money?,” Slater points out the irony of Western man’s desire to accumulate cash. Money is “symbolic” and has no real value in itself. Its purpose is to make barter more efficient. Hence, the more people seek after money, the less valuable it becomes. Slater implies that if collectively we forgot about procuring cash we all would become wealthier. In spite of this Zen logic the author sounds almost prophetic when he writes, “Money was meant to be our servant. But when we depend on servants too much they gradually become our masters, because we have surrendered to them our ability to run our lives.… [The important question is] do you rule money or does money rule you?” (pp. 14–15).

Slater’s central thesis is clear: wealth is not nearly as delectable as Madison Avenue would have us believe. With wealth comes control, and when one is able to control his social cosmological environment, novelty is squeezed out of life and boredom results.

Slater develops this when he challenges our addiction to ownership. This addiction, like our desire for money, tends to reduce freedom, spontaneity, and enjoyment of life. “An owner is simply a servant with as many masters as he or she has possessions” due to the necessities of cleaning, repairing, protecting, and so on. The essential issue, says Slater, is not what we own but “how we spend our time.”

Instead of owning, we are advised to become renters. This, Slater maintains, is both economically more efficient and frees the individual from wealth addiction. Certainly this is poignant advice for Christians whose master told his disciples to travel lightly (Matt. 10:9–10).

Although Slater makes his points well, he could be cited for generalizing and trying to include too much in a single volume. At times the flow of the book is confused: Is it a psychological treatise? A plea for simplicity? An introduction to economics? In spite of this shortcoming, Slater’s thesis desperately needs to be heard in the midst of the cacaphonous roar of Madison Avenue. The acquisition of wealth and goods requires the acquiescence of the person. As the author puts it, “There is no halfway with Money-think. If you want to accumulate a fortune, you have to concentrate on it every waking hour, to the exclusion of all else.”

Infernal Ethics

The Screwloose Lectures, by Larry Richards (Word Books, 1980, 168 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by David Ewert, professor of New Testament, Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary, Fresno, California.

The title of this book is obviously a takeoff on C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Beyond that the two books have little in common. The subtitle, “Studies in the Ethics of Hell,” at first made me wonder how anyone knew so much about hell that he could write an entire book on it. As it turns out, Richards has written a book on ethics from the perspective of hell.

The author imagines Screwloose, a field supervisor in the “Department of Temptry,” giving a course of lectures in the “Underworld University” to a class of demons who are preparing to sabotage God’s kingdom. In 18 lectures this sly professor from “Hell Central” shows Satan’s emissaries how to bring about confusion in ethical thinking among Christians and in this way get them into the clutches of the Evil One.

The lectures fall into three major divisions. Part I deals with the “psychology of ethics,” in which Screwloose suggests that in order to confuse God’s children they should be made to believe that if they know God’s will they will automatically do it. When they discover how impotent they are, they are in the Devil’s snare. Or, they might try to confuse Christians about their emotions. Yet another way of gaining effective control over Christ’s followers is to encourage them to express their natural drives (especially the sexual urge), on the assumption that what’s natural must be right, and repression is unhealthy.

A very subtle way of trapping the saints is to get them to focus on beliefs rather than Christian deportment. Debate over the minutiae of beliefs conveniently keeps them from following Christ. Or, if believers can be made to think that the Christian way is too demanding, their wills will be effectively paralyzed. In short, when people have confused “perceptions,” they are sitting ducks for the Devil’s hunters.

Part II contains seven lectures on how to confuse Christ’s followers with respect to the Bible’s teaching on God, freedom, authority (the Bible’s “chain of command,” for example, becomes an occasion for oppression), truth, guilt, forgiveness, and love—the language of ethics, in other words.

Part III deals with contemporary ethical issues, such as capital punishment, homosexuality, women’s liberation, and abortion.

Richards provides a penetrating analysis of the ethical dilemma in which great masses of American Christians find themselves. The book is highly instructive and comes down hard on some of the gross misconceptions about the Christian life.

This reviewer found himself responding positively to the author at almost every point. The one chapter with which I disagreed seriously was the one on capital punishment. To suggest that the Devil gets Christians under his power when they grow soft on capital punishment reflects, in my thinking, a bit of the same kind of ethical confusion that Richards so ably combats in the rest of the book.

Aside from that, the book is fascinating reading and deserves wide circulation.

Human Love: Divine Love

Gateway to Heaven, by Sheldon Vanauken (Harper & Row, 1980, 288 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by David G. Lalka, assistant professor of English, Columbia Bible College, Columbia, South Carolina.

Sheldon Vanauken, who gave us the remarkable Severe Mercy, is a gifted writer. This new novel displays again a sensitive treatment of love, marriage, and commitment to the God of glory as it reveals the crisis of love and commitment in the marriage of Richard and Mary Vallance.

Vanauken structures the book as the journal record of major events in the lives of Richard and Mary. These journals are the larger chapter divisions of the novel. Vanauken introduces each chapter with a portion of a long letter Richard is writing Mary at the height of her turmoil about love. His narrative technique is unique and adds variety. At one moment, we see things through Richard’s mature, deliberate eyes; at other moments, the events come to us with the lightness and urgency of Mary, the girl-woman-wife. Despite its clarity and inventiveness, the whole tends toward tedium, and the final chapter is nearly a “tacked-on moral” of the sort familiar in morality plays.

Christian faith is not an afterthought. Gateway to Heaven is a thoroughly Christian novel. It does not parade faith before the reader as a sideshow freak but allows him to see it as the breath of life, the call to glory, the gateway to heaven it was designed to be. Though the whole proceeds from Christian presuppositions, it is in the chapters of resolution that Vanauken polishes gems of insight. Responding to Mary’s questions about lesbian love, her father says: “If the God we believe in has a word for you, He will certainly not speak it to me. It is, you see, your question.” Richard’s observations about commitment are pointed: “If a commitment ends when the one who gave it falls in love with somebody else, then it never meant anything in the first place.… Commitment is a gift requiring an act of the will.” Mary’s conclusions about morality are perceptive: “When morality begins to disintegrate, you are getting pretty far from the source: God.…”

Speaking about his novel, Vanauken remarks: “quite apart from being a love story, Gateway to Heaven is conceived to be a tale of high romance, which may loosely be taken to imply ladies fair and knights on quest and roast dragon for dinner.” The novel is high romance, a deep and penetrating treatment of love apart from the clichés of thrillers like Love Story. It captures the special glow and deep imagination of Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. If a reader weathers the book’s slow development, Richard and Mary’s too-easy lifestyle, the unrealistic life of Oxford students and Oxford dons, curious travels to Provence and Hawaii, then he may find reward in the sudden dawning of the book’s greater symbolism. Richard becomes the God of grace and mercy who gives Mary, the shackled sinner, “wings” with mutual commitment in love. Mary’s love endures the earlier temptations to other loves (alternative commitments—sin) in Pauline, in her vision of Mercia, and falling captive to the dazzling beauty of love for Dierdre. As each Christian is called to high and lasting commitment in the demands of God’s love, so Mary, in her decision to leave Dierdre, returns finally to her first love. Richard, who, patient and merciful, receives her with forgiveness. The lessons are marvelous; the symbolism is weighty.

Gateway to Heaven exemplifies fine writing: A Severe Mercy established Vanauken’s gift. Yet the novel is tedious, unrealistic, and at points nearly boring. If one endures, however, he may experience great reward when the novel’s symbolism opens to him. That moment may be worth all the others.

Interpreting The Interpreters

The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description, by Anthony C. Thiselton (Eerdmans, 1979, 484 pp., $22.50), is reviewed by William A. Dyrness, professor of theology, Asian Theological Seminary, Manila, Philippines.

In what may be one of the most significant recent theological books, Anthony Thiselton, senior lecturer in biblical studies at the University of Sheffield, has provided us with a competent and lucid discussion of the newer hermeneutical discussions from an evangelical perspective. Though filled with complex argumentation and laced with names (the bibliography runs to 22 pages), Thiselton’s work shows a rare mastery of material and he never loses the thread of his argument. The result is one of the most highly readable surveys—both critical and sympathetic—of hermeneutics since Schleiermacher.

The author’s thesis is simple. In understanding the text of Scripture one must take into account both the horizon of the text and that of the interpreter. Older treatments of the grammatico-historical method dealt with the former; newer discussions have focused on the latter. The reader’s own pre-understanding—his prejudices and traditions—must be taken into account if he is to avoid reading his own views into the text. Thiselton assumes, however, that “the Bible can and does speak today in such a way as to correct, reshape and enlarge the interpreter’s own horizon.”

Thiselton has chosen Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein for stress because each emphasizes a philosophical description of the process of understanding and language use.

The chapters on Bultmann, which amount to a lucid contribution to our understanding of that theologian, show his indebtedness to nineteenth-century Lutheranism understood in relation to the neo-Kantian dualism between nature and history. Heidegger provided the conceptuality for this problem, though he did not set “the terms of the problem.” This framework then determined the shape of Bultmann’s preunderstanding and the necessity of choosing between facts about God and acts of God.

Gadamer helps us see interpretation as a creative event wherein the interpreter responds to a comprehensive and involving reality, as in a game or festival. He further defines our preunderstanding as traditions that form our horizon, which we seek to fuse with the horizon of the text in the event of understanding. This, Thiselton believes, may help us see the value of systematic theology (the end process of tradition) for exegesis, but may endanger the necessary distance between the two horizons.

The analysis of Wittgenstein is Thiselton’s most original, and probably the first application of language analysis to biblical hermeneutics. He exploits Wittgenstein’s grammar of concepts to show how New Testament language is polymorphous, wherein meaning is dependent on actual life situations. These contexts—Sitze im Leben—can be understood as different language games that express particular situations. At one place, for example, truth may be understood as fact, in another as faithfulness. So “we cannot ask questions about the ‘New Testament concept of truth’ outside a given context or language game.”

Along the way we are treated to shorter discussions, which are no less illuminating. Against Boman and Whorff, Thiselton notes that language serves rather than shapes cultural outlooks. Of liberation theology he asks whether past meaning is not sometimes evaporated in the horizon of the present. Though refreshingly appreciative of newer discussions, as for example Via and Crossan’s work on the parables, Thiselton is careful to point out their limitations: “They encourage a selective or partial interpretation.”

In sum, Thiselton has placed us in his debt by helping to clarify older issues and bringing newer issues to light. This book cannot be neglected if the current state of hermeneutics is to be understood.

BRIEFLY NOTED

The Christian Life. An excellent introduction to the evangelical faith that will help many a newborn Christian is Welcome to the Family (Inter-Varsity), by William W. Wells. Believing God for the Impossible (Here’s Life), by Bill Bright, is a call to supernatural living, explained in simple, helpful terms. A new edition of William B. Oglesby’s With Wings as Eagles (Abingdon) has appeared; it is a study of Christian maturity. Live Your Faith (Pelican), by Russell M. McIntire, is a collection of essays on aspects of the Christian life. Tyndale House has produced a fine three-volume set on Christian living called Growing Stronger: Basic: Growing Stronger: Advanced; and How to Grow Strong Christians, which is a leader’s guide to the other two books. All are by John C. Souter. Charles L. Allen offers The Secret of Abundant Living (Revell). What the Bible Teaches about Christian Living (Tyndale), by Gilbert Kirby, is a look at down-to-earth Christianity. The Promise of Paradox (Ave Maria), by Parker J. Palmer, is a celebration of contradictions in the Christian life, written in a mold reminiscent of Thomas Merton. Soul Friend (Harper & Row), by Kenneth Leech, is a unique blend of spirituality and psychology that radiates the love of Christ.

Two collections of spiritual classics are: A Great Treasury of Christian Spirituality (Carillon Books), compiled by Edward Alcott, and The Guideposts Treasury of Inspiration (Doubleday).

Discipleship. The Discipleship Series (Here’s Life) consists of four volumes dealing with basic discipleship: The Discipleship Series Leader’s Guide, The Discovery Group, The Discipleship Group, and The Leadership Group. NavPress has made available Essentials of Discipleship, by F. M. Cosgrove, Jr. Invitation to Discipleship (Advent Christian General Conference. Box 23152, Charlotte. N.C.), by David S. McCarthy, extends the offer to begin living as a disciple of Christ. The Dynamics of Discipleship Training (Zondervan), by Gary W. Kuhne, instructs how to be and to produce spiritual leaders. You Can Make Disciples (Word), by Gene Warr, shows how to do that. Successful Discipling (Moody), by Allen Hadidian, examines every aspect of disciple making. Bill Ligon offers a long overdue alternative to extremism in Discipleship: The Jesus View (Logos), which is very helpful. A seventh edition of the ever-popular The Lost Art of Disciple Making (Zondervan/NavPress), by Leroy Eims, has recently appeared.

Finally, a specialized look at theological education for the eighties appeared in Discipling through Theological Education by Extension (Moody), edited by Vergil Gerber. It is a valuable source book for this developing ministry.

Christians in Politics. Christian Political Options (AR-Partijstichting, Dr. Kuyperstraat 3, 2514BA, Den Haag, Netherlands) is an enlightening collection of essays delivered at the centennial of the oldest Christian democratic party in the world, the Dutch ARP. Christians Organizing for Political Service (AJP, Box 5769, Washington, D.C.), by James W. Skillen, is an excellent manual on how to get started. Nationhood: Towards a Christian Perspective (Latimer House, 131 Banbury Rd., Oxford, England), by O. R. Johnston, is a theological look at national existence. Frank Morriss looks at The Catholic as Citizen (Franciscan Herald).

Modern Nihilism. The Master Thinkers (Harper & Row), by André Glucksmann, is a trenchantly anti-Marxist treatise by one of the founders of the French “new philosophy.” The Testament of God (Harper & Row), by Bemard-Henri Lévy, scorchingly confronts Marxism with the Bible. Klaus Bockmühl offers a Christian response in The Challenge of Marxism (InterVarsity). Sacred Cows (Zondervan), by J. A. Walter, is a refutation of modern idolatry. Will Men Be Like Gods? (Franciscan Herald), by O. F. Dudley, is a new edition of a 1924 book (introduced by G. K. Chesterton) rejecting humanism. Morality: Religious and Secular (Oxford Univ.), by Basil Mitchell, is a learned and convincing rejection of modern amorality. Technology and the Future (Wedge), by Egbert Schuurman, is a brilliant rejection of modern technocracy.

Economics. The Christian Entrepreneur (Herald Press), by Carl Kreider, is a plea for Christian economic nonconformity. Capitalism and Progress (Wedge/Eerdmans), by Bob Goudzwaard, is a carefully handled analysis of the modern belief in human progress that underlies capitalism. The Christian in Industrial Society (InterVarsity), by Sir Fred Catherwood, will probably cause “big buck” Christians to squirm a good bit. Labour of Love: Essays on Work (Wedge) and Work and Religion (T & T Clark/Seabury), edited by Gregory Baum, are symposia that discuss labor from a Christian point of view.

Scientific Thought. Three recent antievolutionary works are: King of Creation (C.L.P.), by Henry Morris; The Other Side of Evolution (Williams Brothers, Box 35, LaVergne, Tenn.), by Jon G. Williams; and Science and God in the 80’s (Harvest House), by Harold J. Sala. Sociology and Human Destiny (Seabury), edited by Gregory Baum, is a helpful collection of essays.

Polanyi insists that we arrive at both faith and knowledge by the same methods.

The question of reason and faith is a perennial one that survives all proposed solutions. The issue is frequently formulated in such terms as: science and religion, reason and religion, or nature and values. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant expressed the supposed antithesis between reason and faith so as to posit a radical severance between general and religious knowledge. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s elaboration of the same theme gave institutional form to the cleavage between the two.

The question remains: Is there an inevitable opposition between the deliverances of reason and the affirmations of religion? With respect to the content of the two, much of the thought of the West since 1800 has maintained that science is the product of reason, while religion is the result of a non-rational activity called faith.

Resolution of the alleged dissonance between the two has in practice frequently been undertaken in terms of the radical subordination of religion to reason, and of Christian theology to the scientific mode. The hidden assumption here has been that science operates on an open-end and objective model, with the scientist being neutral and uncommitted with respect to values, while the religious person operates on the basis of nonrational data or of unwarranted persuasion.

In practice, this mode, dominant for nearly two centuries, has tended to make of theology a mere appendage or subpoint under the heading of rational inquiry.

Such a mode understandably called forth opposition, the most radical and for a time the most effective attempt at resolution of the reason-faith dualism being the dialectical theology. Karl Barth and those following him took their cue from Sören Kierkegaard, who not only asserted the fact of a radical cleavage between scientific (general) knowledge and religious understanding, but identified this hypothesis with Christian faith, rightly understood. The impact of this mode of thought sent waves throughout Western liberal theology, chiefly in the twenties and thirties of our century, but is largely a matter of antiquarian study today.

It remains true that the assumption of a radical severance between scientific and religious knowledge has not only been powerfully influential in liberal Protestant circles down to our own day, but has also exerted a deep, even if seldom articulated, influence upon evangelical wings of the church. True, many evangelicals have both discerned and opposed this dissonance, but a thoroughgoing challenge to it has not gained wide acceptance in orthodox circles.

There are present-day indications of an emerging fresh approach to the reason-faith question, an approach which challenges on a wide front the motif of a radical severance between the two elements. A leading, even if less-known advocate of this new approach, is the Hungarian-born British chemist, Michael Polanyi (1891–1976).

Polanyi began his learned studies as a scientist, and it was only in the thirties that his researches were turned to the question of the supposed antithesis between reason and faith. In the three decades following the year 1936, he gave to the West not only a powerful refutation of the accepted dualism, reason versus faith, but afforded also a new and fresh view of the wide bearings of the question.

Through his researches as a scientist he gave to the intellectual world a penetrating analysis of the vast range of negative implications of the supposed antithesis between reason and faith. These had to do with the manner in which such a severance posed a definite threat to personal identity, to our being thoroughly human, and even more serious, to a radical severance between the intellectual life and moral values, a fact which he saw as lying at the root of much of the tragedy of Western civilization since 1917.

He thus exposes both the personal and the social perils inherent in the older rift between knowing and being, in which living beings have too frequently come to be treated as mere things, construed as being known only in terms of chemistry, and thus without meaning as persons. His contacts with both Nazism and the developments in Eastern Europe led him to see the wider bearings in human society of the severance of thought from responsible being.

He proposed to restore the unity of fact and value in terms of a new methodology, in which is abandoned the supposed ideal of scientific detachment. He regards this ideal, when made a dominant paradigm, to be in no sense harmless, but radically destructive to the entire range of scientific endeavor.

Mr. Polonyi insists that every activity of reason is conditioned and shaped by assumptions. These may or may not be articulated, but they are there. It is at this point that general knowledge and religious knowledge find a common base.

The obvious consequence is that both reason and faith share a common platform of accepted knowledge, a platform which at its deepest level answers to something profound in the human structure. Here, taking his cue from the Gestalt psychology, Polonyi believes he can show that the human intellect possesses what he calls a “tacit power” by which all knowledge can be apprehended.

Further, he maintains that all knowledge is gained through the heuristic or discovering method. By this he means that both scientific and “believing” knowledge are achieved by a process in which the personal powers for knowing are involved at every stage and at every level.

The major thrust of Polonyi’s work has profound implications for Christian faith. Not only is faith legitimated upon the basis of a new understanding of the learning structure of man, but it is also given several positive roles. Theology can, he insists, afford to mankind a new perception of reality. It can serve to counter the current severance between scientific “humane” thinking, and between fact and moral value. Further, it can afford both stimulus and direction to scientific endeavor, opening new vistas for scientific exploration by widening the integrative and heuristic function of the human understanding.

Polanyi’s insistence upon the compatibility of Christian theology with scientific endeavor has served to stimulate what may prove to be a new movement in theological endeavor. Prof. Jerry Gill, in his volume The Possibility of Religious Knowledge, extends Polanyi’s motif of tacit knowledge, and explores the implications of Polanyi’s thought for resolving the fatal dualism of fact and value. Other writers, including Thomas F. Torrance, Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Harold Schilling, and Langdon Gilkey, are taking cues from Polanyi’s researches. It is possible that new categories and new paradigms for Christian theology may be developed, by which there may come a balanced view of the relation of Christian truth to the larger body of human knowledge.

More important still, it is possible that these newer developments may open the door to new and creative forms of cooperation between the scientific community and the fellowship of Christian scholars. These in turn may give new and significant vitality to the entire body of Christ.

HAROLD B. KUHN¹Dr. Kuhn is professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

Sadder still is the film’s inability to live with its own conclusions.

As an art form, film is unsurpassed in its capacity for visual brutality. At best, it is an exhilarating ride. At its worst, the process leaves the viewer soiled and violated by the product of someone else’s polluted imagination. Rarely in American cinema, with its symbiotic relationship to commerce, does extreme abuse occur; offended viewers make for bad box office. Yet, it has become common practice for many twentieth-century artists to mistake intellectual pornography for artistic originality. Smugly attacking bourgeois social conventions, they rather stretch and shatter the boundaries of propriety and elevate immorality to a place of ideological honor. Director Ken Russell’s Altered States does not necessarily do this, but because it seems to, the result will no doubt be the same for many Christians.

John Lilly’s experiments with LSD and sensory deprivation are by now well known. A forerunner of Timothy Leary, Dr. Lilly would ingest LSD and float in the total darkness of an isolation tank filled with blood-warm water. There he would experience “universes containing beings much larger than myself,” and “processes of immense energy of fantastic light, and of terrifying power.” His experiments began in 1964, and nearly two decades and countless fried minds later, the myth of drug-induced altered states of consciousness resurfaces in this Warner Brothers film. It is the story of Eddie Jessup, an ultra-brilliant scientist, whose experiments with sensory deprivation and Mexican mushrooms take him to the edge of the great void where life began. Along the way he encounters and rejects the Christian symbols of blood sacrifice and original sin and has a quite literal encounter with Dr. Lilly’s “terrifying power.” Jessup is a seeker of truth, a pilgrim: but what he finds on his journey is definitely not good news for modern man.

Unlike Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Ken Russell’s Altered States takes Christianity quite seriously, and systematically dispenses with it. Eddie Jessup was a religious child, but he sheds his faith like a mildewed winter coat upon the death of his father. The senior Jessup has seen the other side, and his one dying word changes his son’s life: “Terrible,” he whispers. Turning from a sadistic deity, Eddie Jessup embraces the gilded altar of science. Christianity, the fallen faith, is calculated, dissected, and reduced to schizophrenia, and the schizoid condition is viewed as a higher state of consciousness: a threshold awareness of greater reality.

Jessup turns his experiments inward. He states emphatically: “The individual mind contains the ultimate truth.” The action accelerates as he enters the isolation tank a second time. The images come quickly like a slap in the face, unbidden and unexpected—a visual and aural force-feeding as we participate in Jessup’s hallucinogenic visions. A goat’s head with seven eyes swivels and blinks on the shoulders of a writhing, crucified Christ. A cross burns on the chest of the dying father. The young Jessup repeatedly casts aside a white child’s Bible. The seven-eyed goat is slaughtered, and the blood from the slashed throat spills across an ornate Bible. The images are grotesque, brightly flashing blasphemy—visual punctuation for the spoken dialogue.

Russell’s direction is deliberately shocking. Like Jessup, the audience must pass beyond mental artifacts that are the veneer of a fuller vision of existence. Christianity is illusion, an elaborate social myth arising from prehistoric memory. The result is a directorial lobotomy that slices through the belief structures and inhibitions of both Jessup and the audience. Our outrage is numbed by the swiftness the editing produces—we barely comprehend one image before it is replaced by another, causing the mind to lean toward rather than turn away from the distasteful pictures. We are left gasping, wide open for what comes next.

Jessup “would sell his soul to find the great truth,” and he does precisely that as his research leads him to Mexico and the fabled magic mushrooms. As he uncovers a level of memory corresponding to the antiquity of Genesis, Altered States dispenses with our cultured myths of biblical revelation. Flying high on the Indians’ psychedelic brew, Jessup witnesses the temptation of Adam and Eve, only it is he and Mrs. Jessup in the starring roles. They are, indeed, in a garden, but the attire is formal and Eve spoons forbidden pudding from a silver goblet. The Serpent hangs from an awning. The scene changes and the snake is strangling Jessup. The final sequence is remarkable, unforgettable, as we witness creation in reverse. Jessup and his wife lie facing each other in the dirt. A fine grey dust gradually coats their bodies. Their features are soon barely recognizable as they are transformed into rough statues of stone. The wind blows incessantly as the statues erode, until all traces of created Man and Woman disappear into the swirling dunes.

Russell has stripped away each successive level from New Testament to Old, implying through Jessup’s hallucinations that the basic realities of the Christian faith are mythological trappings disguising primitive drives and fears. The goat’s head on Christ connects the biblical sacrificial lamb with prehistoric man’s dependence on the blood and flesh of slain wild sheep for sustenance. Adam and Eve’s dinner clothes emphasize the civilized roots of the temptation “myth.” Jessup struggles with the serpent, Satan; and the final enemy Russell sees destroyed is not death, as I Corinthians says, but the concept of revelation itself. The Devil is a spook, an elaboration on our natural fear of reptiles. The death of a lizard he has killed during his mushroom experience signals a new isolation for mankind. We alone are responsible for our acts, for the insane fact of conscious biological life. We are the touchstone, the single source of truth. The highest morality is, simply, to seek that truth, to penetrate the fog of primal memory. Jessup explains: “Ever since we dispensed with God, we have nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life.” It is a statement of profound despair, for it is impossible to explain what is meaningless. To pause in the search is to die, and Altered States carries this philosophy of despair to its ultimate absurd end.

Having passed through the levels of historical illusion. Jessup’s mind and body begin physically to turn in upon themselves, tracing the evolutionary pathway to its purposeless atomic beginning. Alone one evening, he enters the tank and emerges as an ape-like creature. The howling Cro-Magnon man is chased by security guards and a pack of wild dogs, ending up in the city zoo where he slays and eats a goat. Later, he tells his frightened wife: “My will consisted of nothing more than making it through the night. It was the most exhilarating experience of my life.” His singular quest for truth rendered him incapable of relating to those around him. “Nothing in the human condition means anything to him,” his wife admits sadly. But Jessup needs to validate his experiences, hoping to find in the repetition of the scientific method the single eternal truth of existence, to resurrect the God he has destroyed—one who is controllable and easy to define. He enters the isolation tank for the final experiment. Two hours pass and the scientist begins to scream. His body, the tank, the entire room pulsate as his genetic structure approaches that ultimate moment of intense energy that was the beginning of impersonal life. Jessup has met his God and his horrified screams shatter the room.

The Indian, Brujo, keeper of the mushrooms, had told Jessup he would see in his visions “the crack between the nothing … and out of this nothing will come your unborn self.” It is a logical assumption that out of nothing comes nothing and Eddie Jessup, in search of his “true self,” confronted and became a part of “the ultimate terror that is the beginning of life,” and found it to be “nothing … hideous nothing.” Returning from the void, this seeker of truth could only say of his findings: “The final truth is that there is no final truth.”

This is the reality Altered States promises us in place of the Christian universe: a hideous beginning, a meaningless existence, and a terrible end. Having merged with nothingness. Jessup states despairingly that it is now a part of him and wonders if he will be able to live with the knowledge. It is the saddest line in this tragic film. To dispense with God is to become an island of darkness, a product of the void, where screams of terror are the only proof of existence.

Sadder still is the film’s inability to live with its own conclusions. Brought to the point of despair, we are offered a saccharine pill to sweeten the taste. As Jessup is sinking into the void, his wife, against a background of stars, reaches into the whirlpool and pulls him back. For a moment they are beautiful star children, gods in the act of salvation. In the closing moments they are both transformed into pure energy, and only through an act of will does he save them from destruction. They embrace and for the first time he is able to tell her he loves her. It is an absurdly sophomoric leap of faith for this intelligent man—an attempt at an upbeat ending that is certainly sadder than Russell intended. In the world of Altered States, the characters must settle for something less than truth. The couple clasp each other desperately, yet they remain, despite the director’s efforts, a new Adam and Eve in a hopeless Eden.

Followers of the God of Israel and his Son Jesus Christ have experienced altered states ever since the Creator blew breath into his creation when the universe was new. He parted the sea and tossed Ezekiel’s wheels into the air. The works of God are tangible, verifiable realities and the Bible is a historical record of his interaction with humanity. Above all, the insurmountable, unalterable fact of Christianity is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To be born again is to be altered eternally. To meet the God who is living is to know at last, not the ultimate terror, but the pure joy that is the beginning of life.

HARRY M. CHENEY¹Mr. Cheney is an assistant sound editor for network television programs and a graduate student at Loyola-Marymount University Film School, Los Angeles.